Making A Cartoon Movie 11: What To Do When You Horrifically Fail Crowdfunding

So me and Jordan had been trying to raise money for The Hit Squad Movie. Spending ridiculous amounts of time online and making new friends, we managed to raise over $10,000 towards the movie. This was 41% of our target goal, not great. So, what next?

If it was Kickstarter, we would’ve lost everything because we didn’t reach our goal. With it being IndieGoGo, we got to keep what we raised. But how do we make a movie with under half of what we needed? Admittedly, the budget we made at the time was really ill-informed. I remember thinking “why do you need £1m to make a movie? We just need to pay for computers and time!”, which was the logic of how we budgeted the movie. Therefore, if $25,000 was too little to make a movie, so was $10,000. So, after a much needed and amazing last gasp moment of awesome help from then investor, now friend, Steve Dengler, we reassessed how to make a feature length animated movie for $10k.

The first few weeks were filled with a strange optimism where I phased out my day job, brushed up on my Adobe After Effects skills, got a breather from the hellish nightmare that was crowdfunding to start work on the movie. Our plan: use the money to buy a workhorse computer, make the movie as best we can and use the rest of the money to pay freelancers to do the jobs we couldn’t do ourselves. Using the length of time it took to make our test animations we estimated it would take 4 months to make a full length movie. What could go wrong?